Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai was born in 1940 in the village of Ihithe near Nyeri, in the Kikuyu highlands of central Kenya. Brilliant and determined, she studied biology in the United States and Germany before earning a doctorate at the University of Nairobi in 1971 — becoming the first woman in East or Central Africa to hold a PhD, in veterinary anatomy.

Seeing how deforestation and erosion were draining the lives of rural women — less firewood, less clean water, poorer soil — she founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977. Her idea was disarmingly direct: pay women to plant indigenous trees in their own communities. Over the decades the movement planted tens of millions of trees and put income and standing into the hands of thousands of women, binding together conservation, democracy and human rights.

Her work brought her into open conflict with Kenya's authorities, but she never backed down. In 2004 she became the first African woman — and the first environmentalist — to win the Nobel Peace Prize, honoured "for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace." She loved to tell the parable of the hummingbird, carrying single drops of water to a burning forest while the bigger animals looked on: "I will be a hummingbird; I will do the best I can." She died in 2011.